Necropolitics and Memory in New York’s Jewish Sex-Workers’ Cemeteries

This paper analyzes American Jews’ use of burials to control Jews involved in the sex trade, and sex workers’ subsequent rebellion against that control. Previous scholars have highlighted religion’s role in necropolitics, that is the way death is used to control populations. However, their analysis has typically ignored burial sites in favor of other necropolitical practices such as incarceration. In contrast, I turn to NYIBA’s cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens to understand wayward Jews’ response to death subjugation. Methodologically, my analysis also differs from prior studies of Jewish “impure” cemeteries in Argentina and Brazil in my close attention to the NYIBA cemeteries’ spatial layout, inscriptions, and iconography. I do so to reveal how the NYIBA used their cemeteries to memorialize the dead and combat Jewish communal attempts to dictate who could attain eternal life.